Or love was a malady; it was dangerous to live with those consumed by it. He felt an uneasiness. Might not a wasting and restlessness ensue? It would not, if he caught it, be recognizable as love. Perhaps he had already got it slightly. That might account for his hanging about her. He evidently was suffering from something that came from Bertha.
Everybody, however, all personality, was catching. We all are sicknesses for each other. Such contact as he had with Bertha was particularly risky. Their photographs he had just been looking at displayed an unpleasant solidarity. Was it necessary to allege “love” at all? The word was superfluous in his case. The fact was before him.
He felt suddenly despondent and afraid of the Future. He had fallen beneath a more immediate infection.
He looked attentively round the room. His memory already ached. She had loved him with all this. She had loved him with the plaster cast of Beethoven, attacked him with the Klingers, ambushed him from the Breton jars, in a funny, superficial, absorbing way. Her madness had muddled everything with his ideal existence. It wasn’t like leaving an ordinary room you had spent pleasant hours in and would regret. You would owe nothing to that, and it could not pursue you with images of wrong. This room he was wronging, and left it in a different way. She seemed, too, so humble in it, or through it. The appeal of the little again. If he could only escape from scale. The price of preoccupation with the large was this perpetual danger from the little. He wished he could look coldly on mere littleness, and not want to caress and protect it when it was human. Brutality was no doubt necessary for people like him. Love was too new to him. He was not inoculated enough with love.
He had callously been signing his name to a series of brutalities, then, as though he were sure that when the time came he would have a quite sufficient stock of coldness to meet these debts. Yet he had known from the first that he had not. Eventually he would have to evade them or succumb. The flourishes of the hand and mind had caused Bertha’s mute and mournful attitude. She thought she knew him, but was amazed at his ignorance or pretence.
So he had now brought this new element into relief. For the last hour he had been accumulating difficulties, or rather unearthing some new one at every step. Impossible to tackle en masse, they were all there before him. The thought of “settling everything before he went,” now appeared monstrous. He had, anyhow, started these local monsters and demons, fishing them to the light. Each had a different vocal explosiveness or murmur, inveighing unintelligibly against each other. The only thing to be done was to herd them all together and march them away for inspection at leisure.
Sudden herdsman, with the care of a delicate and antediluvian flock; well!—But what was Bertha to be told? Nothing. He would file out silently with his flock, without any hornblasts or windings such as he customarily affected.
“I am going now,” he said at last, getting up.
She looked at him with startled interest.
“You are leaving me, Sorbet?”